Google is giving away its machine-learning software

Google researcher Jeff Dean unveiled the company’s open-source machine learning system TensorFlow on November 9, 2015. Source: Google Inc.Google’s move to give away its latest machine-learning software, key to its speech- and photo-recognition programs, isn’t as crazy as it may appear.The unit of Alphabet said it is releasing its TensorFlow system for free under an open-source license. That’s one of the company’s crown jewels, a machine-learning program that teaches computers to be smarter.But Google retains much of what makes its machine-learning effort special: massive piles of data, a powerful network of computers to run the software and a big team of artificial-intelligence experts to tweak the algorithms.“It’s not a suicidal idea to release this,” said Nello Cristianini, a professor of artificial intelligence at the UK’s University of Bristol. “Deep learning is not plug-and-play. It needs…